Category Archives: Gold Dust Books

How Much Money Can You Make Per Hour Selling Books Online?

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Hey guys! Thanks for sending me all your questions – I really appreciate the feedback!

Recently, I got an email with a question that I’m sure is on a lot of people’s minds when they start selling books online for extra money.

“How much money can you make selling used books online?”

It’s a fair question – and one that will influence not only your decision to sell books online but how you choose to sell books online as well.

The good news is this – if you adopt some good strategies for selling books online (like the ones I teach in this blog) and keep using them, the money you make in an hour will not only become substantial but also keep growing as you continue selling books online.

For instance, my part time job selling books online currently allows me to make $20 an hour. This net hourly wage is calculated by taking into account the time I spend looking for books to sell, listing books on Amazon, selling books to buyback companies, and packing books for shipping.

However, before you start expecting to make this money right away, there’s something you should know.

This wage includes the money I make selling books to buyback companies and Amazon.com. In other words, while you can make money by only selling books to buyback companies, if you want a higher hourly wage, you need to sell books on Amazon.com and to buyback companies.

Let’s take a look at how different strategies for selling books online can affect how much money you make per hour.

Selling Books to Buyback Companies

If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll know I’m a big advocate for selling books to buyback companies you can find on Bookscouter.com. There are a few reasons for this.

First, it’s a lot easier to find books to sell for extra cash to buyback companies. These books include many subjects – popular fiction, textbooks, science, history etc. – and can be found anywhere from thrift shops to library bookstores to garage sales.

And while the buyback bids offered for these books might not seem high (most sell anywhere from $2 -$10), if you buy the books cheaply and pack several of them into a single box, you can still make a decent profit from each buyback order (I make a net profit that can range from $15-$50 for each buyback package I send).

Second, you can sell books immediately to buyback companies. There’s no need to wait for a customer to find your book in your online bookstore and place an order – these companies want the books now and will pay quickly (usually about 2 weeks after you send the books to them).

Because this turnaround is so fast, you don’t have to worry about all your money being tied up in inventory – you can liquidate and reinvest your books on a regular basis and generate a steady stream of revenue.

And finally, by using a free book scouting service like Bookscouter.com to find books to sell online, you can keep your overhead costs even lower since you don’t have to pay for a book scouting service.

Along with these positives, however, come a few downsides.

For one thing, you’ll need to find a lot of books to send to these buyback companies if you expect to make a decent profit. This can be time consuming (which will reduce your hourly wage) which is why I highly recommend investing in a good barcode scanner that will make finding profitable books much faster and easier.

Another snag I’ve found is that some thrift shops and library bookstores are located in Internet “dead zones” which makes it harder for me to use a free online service like Bookscouter.com. This also eats up time, so it can be handy to use a PDA and scanner which find books using a downloaded database that doesn’t need Internet access.

And while you will find books that buyback companies will bid high prices for (I regularly sell single books for $50-$80), the vast majority of the books will still sell for only $2-$10, which can limit your profits.

So how does this affect your hourly wage?

Well, when I first started selling books to only buyback companies, I could make $8 to $10 an hour selling books online. Not bad if you’re looking for a way to raise money for a vacation or Christmas, but not that great either.

Over time, I invested in a barcode scanner and learned to spot the books buyback companies would want while bypassing the ones they didn’t. This let me find and sell more books in less time, letting me make about $12 to $15 an hour. Better – but I was still spending more time for what I felt should be a higher return.

To really make more money, I needed to merge other internet bookselling techniques with the Bookscouter book selling technique.

Which brings me to –

Selling Books on Amazon

This is the strategy most online booksellers think of when they sell books online. And it comes with some benefits – some of which I cover in my article, Should You Sell Textbooks on Amazon or to a Book Buyback Company to Make Money?

To recap: When you sell books on Amazon.com, you can list your book for any price you want. If you want to sell your book for $300, you can list it for that price. You don’t have to let an online buyback company’s bid dictate what you sell your book for.

The problem is that you need to wait for someone to purchase your books for that price to see any return on your investment. This isn’t a big deal for someone with a large amount of inventory who can sell books every day – but it is a problem if you’re just starting out and only have a couple dozen books listed on Amazon.

It could take months or even years for some of those books to sell – and while the time and effort to pack a single book isn’t that much, you’ll need to keep building your inventory if you expect to make a decent hourly wage.

Another issue is that Amazon.com will take out its own commissions and fees before you get paid – and you may have to invest your own money for postage and/or insurance. This isn’t such a bad deal if the book is an expensive one – but if you only sell cheap books, a lot of your profit will be sucked out.

That’s not to say people can’t earn a good hourly wage by only selling on Amazon.com – many established sellers with huge inventories claim they earn over $30-$40 an hour. But unless you can quickly build a large inventory of profitable books – and keep replenishing them as they sell – you won’t make a lot of money fast this way.

Having said that — I have learned and developed several strategies over the years that have allowed me to sell my books faster and for higher prices on Amazon. If you’d like to take advantage of these special tactics, please feel free to check out my Sell Books Fast Online eBook series.

How to Make More Money an Hour Selling Books Online

So how do I use Amazon.com to make more money selling books online?

Simple – I list books that go for very high profits on Amazon.com. Then I sell the rest to buyback companies using Bookscouter to find the best places to sell online.

It’s a basic technique that’s worked out very well for me. The money I make immediately from buyback sales more than covers the cost of any books I list on Amazon.com.

Then, over time, the books I list on Amazon.com start selling. Sometimes it takes weeks, months, or even years – but since I’ve already recouped my initial investment on those books, I don’t need to worry about not getting my money back.

And once I start generating regular Amazon.com sales, my hourly wage increases – and will continue growing since my income comes from two streams – buyback companies and regular Amazon.com sales.

How Should You Make Money Selling Books Online?

So should you sell books on both Amazon.com and to buyback companies like I do?

Well, that’s up to you.

If you just want to raise money for a vacation, project, or gift, then maybe you don’t have to sell on Amazon. Just invest a few weeks selling books to buyback companies (use a barcode scanner if you want to make the work faster and easier) and you’ll earn the extra money you need.

On the other hand, if you want to generate a source of regular income and earn a decent hourly wage, then you’ll want to sell to both buyback companies and Amazon.com. It doesn’t take long to list a book on Amazon, and the time you invest will pay off once your inventory grows and you make more money selling used books online.

Want to receive more tips and tricks for how to sell books online for extra money? Subscribe to my blog!

Do you have a question or suggestion for a future blog article? Email me at sellbooksfastonline@gmail.com.

How to Find an ISBN and Use it to Sell Books Online for Profit

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Okay, you’re all set to start making some extra money selling books online. You’ve read my blog, know all about Bookscouter.com, and how much money you can earn selling books through buyback companies.

You are ready to find the best places to sell books online and start making extra money!

Then you go to Bookscouter.com and see the following words in their search engine:

“Search an ISBN”

Wait. What the heck is an ISBN?

What is an ISBN?

An ISBN can be your best friend or your worst enemy when it comes to selling books online – depending on how much you know about it and how easily you can find it.

ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number and is a numerical code often found above a book’s barcode or in the publication information page. The code is like the book’s social security number and identifies the book’s publisher, its edition (i.e. hardcover, paperback, 13th edition of a textbook etc.), and where it was published.

Every book (as well as different editions of the same book – especially textbooks) has a different ISBN. Almost all books published after 1970 have an ISBN.

ISBNs are all 13 digits or 10 digits long.

13-digit ISBNs begin with the numbers 978.

10-digit ISBNs in the U.S. all begin with a 0 or 1. (If the book was published in a different country, the 10-digit ISBN might begin with a different number).

So what does this mean to you?

It means if you find out how much money you can sell your book for, you need to locate the ISBN of your book and enter it in Bookscouter.com. Bookscouter can then look up the book and tell you how much different buyback companies will pay for that book.

Sounds easy, right?

Well… not always.

Problems with Finding the ISBN of a Book

Most of the time, finding and using the ISBN is as easy as turning to the back cover of the book and scanning the barcode with your barcode scanner. The ISBN will then appear in the Bookscouter.com search bar and bring up all the buyback company bids.

The problem is, sometimes the barcode on the back of a book doesn’t contain the ISBN.

Instead, the barcode contains what’s known as the Universal Product Code (UPC) which is a different set of numbers that also identifies the book.

Unfortunately the UPC makes no sense to Bookscouter.com and you won’t get any information on the book if you scan that code.

(You can tell if a barcode contains an ISBN or UPC by glancing at the numbers below the barcode. If the numbers begin with 978 it’s an ISBN. Otherwise it’s often a UPC).

Other times, even if the barcode contains the ISBN, it’s covered with a sticker from the store it’s being sold in. These stickers have their own barcodes – so your scanner reads that barcode instead of the ISBN and brings up no information.

In these situations, you need to peel off enough of the sticker (making sure not to damage its barcode) so you can scan the book’s actual ISBN barcode.

Sometimes the sticker is stuck too hard for you to scan the book’s barcode.

It’s frustrating. Believe me, I know.

There have been times I found a book I was sure would fetch a great price – and then wasted a lot of precious time trying to find and scan the ISBN.

A lot of people give up early in the game because of this – and I can’t entirely blame them. While selling books online is a fun way of making extra money, problems like this can lead to a lot of headaches if you don’t develop a strategy to deal with them.

So how do I get around these problems?

Like this:

Top Three Places to Find the ISBN Barcode

While the back cover of a book is the most common place to find the ISBN barcode, it is not the only place where one can be located.

Thus, your first strategy when you can’t scan the back cover is to see if the ISBN barcode is somewhere else in the book.

If the book is a paperback, flip to the inside front cover. A lot of paperback books have a second ISBN barcode inside the front cover that can be easily scanned.

If the book is a hardcover with a dust jacket, look at the inside edges of the dust jacket, where the ISBN barcode can also be located and scanned easily.

Other Places to Find the ISBN

Sometimes, a book doesn’t contain a barcode (or has one that’s covered by a sticker) but does have an ISBN you can locate.

In these situations, you need to enter the ISBN manually into your phone, tablet, or laptop since there’s no barcode to scan with your barcode scanner.

This can be annoying, but if you find a book you think can sell for a lot online, it’s still worth it to spend the extra time typing in the ISBN – especially since a lot of other book dealers may have passed it over, increasing the chances of it being worth something.

First, look at the back cover again. Even if the book doesn’t have a barcode, it might still have the ISBN printed on the back or on a sticker.

If that doesn’t work, flip to the publication information page (it’s usually one of the first five pages of the book) and find the ISBN there.

Be careful – sometimes the publication information page lists multiple ISBNs for the hardcover and paperback versions of the book, so you need to enter the ISBN for the version of the book you’re looking up.

Speeding Up Your Search With a Scanner

Despite these problems, most of the time, finding the ISBN is still just a matter of finding the barcode on the back cover of a book and entering it into Bookscouter.com.

However, you can probably tell by now that entering a 10-digit or 13-digit code manually every time you want to look up a book can be time consuming and lead to a lot of headaches.

That’s why I strongly suggest anyone who wants to sell books online for extra money invest in a barcode scanner before they start selling books online to buyback companies or on Amazon.

These scanners will save you a lot of stress and you’ll find they pay for themselves many times over thanks to all the additional books you can find in less time.

You can read my reviews of some of these scanners at How to Make More Money Selling Books Online with the Bluetoorth Cordless Hand Scanner.

Is the Book Condition of Your Textbook Good Enough to Make Extra Money?

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What’s the first thing you should do when your Bluetooth Cordless Hand Scanner and tablet/cell phone tell you the book you just found is worth a lot of money?

If you answered, “Jump up and down and squeal like a little girl” – sorry, but you’re wrong (and seriously, what’s wrong with you? That kind of behavior can get you thrown out of the store! Well, unless you are a little girl…).

No, what you want to do is check to see if the book condition of the textbook or popular fiction book you found is good enough to sell online to buyback websites (or Amazon).

Here’s the deal – while you can find valuable books for cheap prices at thrift stores and garage sales, a lot of these books have been treated pretty badly. Pages get marked up and/or torn out, bindings get broken, and water damage can make turning pages a nightmare.

And if you make the mistake of sending these books to a buyback website to make extra money? Sorry, but you’ll usually end up losing money – sometimes a lot.

To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, here are four common problems with book condition that should make you think twice before you try and sell them online for cash.

Water Damage

Ugh! These are the most common defects in used books. Sometimes the previous owner spilled a drink in his or her book, making the pages stain, stick and/or warp.

Obviously these books will be rejected by all buyback websites – the problem is sometimes it’s not easy to spot water damage at first glance.

Get in the habit of flipping through a book’s pages before you put it in your cart to buy. If you notice any warped, wrinkled, or discolored pages – put it back!

Broken Binding

Books with deep wrinkles running down its spine may have a broken spine where the pages are starting to separate from the cover.

Sometimes, broken binding is hard to spot (especially in hardback books) since the cover might look fine and hide any internal damage. Naturally, buyback websites won’t buy these books.

The same test you use for water damage can help here – books with broken bindings usually reveal their weak spots when you flip through the pages.

Marked Up or Missing Pages

Textbooks and workbooks can fetch a high price on buyback websites – especially if they’re recent editions.

But before you throw that book in your cart, check to see if the book has any quiz questions or fill-in-the-blank pages.

If you spot any writing, circling, or filled-in multiple choice slots, put the book back! Likewise, if you find any pages missing, put the book back! Buyback websites will not buy those books for cash!

Books that have a little highlighting, underlining, or even notes in the margins are a unique case. As long as the book only has a few markings (usually on less than 25% of its pages) and the text is easy to read, some buyback websites – including Textbooks.com, Cash 4 Books, Chegg, TextbookRush, and Valore – will buy these books.

But be careful! Study the book condition guidelines provided by these buyback websites before you send them anything, and be careful not to send them anything that might make it difficult to resell (like filled in quiz questions)

Missing Supplemental Materials

These days when you buy a book, you’re not always just buying a book – you’re buying a multimedia experience thanks to the CDs, DVDs, computer codes, and/or CD-ROMs that come with the book.

Make sure all these supplemental materials are in the book – buyback websites will not pay for a book that doesn’t have all its extra materials. Does the cover advertise a CD? Check the inside covers to make sure it’s in its plastic sleeve (and free of scratches).

Have the computer codes in the book been torn out or opened? Then you probably can’t sell the books for cash to a buyback website.

Other Problems with Book Condition

If you make sure to check for the four common book condition defects listed above, you should be able to make significantly more extra money selling books online.

That said, there are still other qualities that you should keep in mind when assessing book condition that will affect whether or not you can sell the book online for cash.

If you buy a lot of books at library sales, for instance, you should find out first if the buyback website you want to sell the book to accepts ex-library books (some buyback websites pay a lot of money for ex-library books, others will reject them, and still others will only pay half their quoted buyback price for them).

Because of this, it’s always a good idea to review each buyback website’s policies on book condition before sending your books to them for cash. Trust me – you’ll make more money this way and save yourself a lot of frustration.

Once you know your textbooks and/or other books are in acceptable condition for the buyback website you want to sell to, it’s time to cash in! Find out where you can sell your books for the most money in Best Books to Sell Online to Buyback Companies and The Best Places to Sell Textbooks Online Besides Amazon Part 1.

And – as always – remember to subscribe to my blog to receive updates on more tools and tricks to make more money selling books for cash online!

What Are the Best Books to Sell Online to Book Buyback Companies?

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This is the first in a series of blog posts that will go over various book subjects and/or genres and let you know which buyback companies will offer you good prices for them if you sell them online.

Please note that before selling your books online to a buyback company, you should always check the company’s policies on the condition your books must be in to make sure they will accept your books and pay you the promised price quote. Remember – some buyback companies will pay handsomely for a book with highlighting and notes, while others will reject them flat out. Make sure you know the company polices!

With that said, here are my thoughts on how much extra money you can earn for bestsellers and graphic novels.

Bestsellers

These type of books (which can include top selling thrillers and literary fiction) are a mixed bag that can range from highly desirable to completely worthless.

The reason for this lies in the nature of bestsellers – because they’re so popular, publishers print a lot of copies (millions of copies if you’re a hot author like Stephen King).

On one hand, this is great since these books are easy to find in thrift stores a few months after their initial release. If the hype for these books is still high, you can expect to earn a nice profit on such books (I’ve personally bought recent bestsellers for $1 and sold them for $8 a few hours later).

On the other hand, this large supply leads to rapid depreciation once demand for these books cools and stores are left with thousands of books very few people want.

When selling to buyback companies though, this depreciation can slow somewhat since some buybacks can still reach interested readers. Most buybacks won’t offer you a ton of money for outdated bestsellers ($2 to $5 a book is fairly typical), but they will often offer more than you can get by selling them on Amazon.com.

(Plus, since most bestsellers continue to depreciate over time, it’s to your advantage to sell them fast – which usually means selling to a buyback company.)

When selling bestsellers, I recommend you sell to Powells Books (if the book is in excellent shape) as they buy more popular fiction than any other buyback company I’ve dealt with. There’s an excellent chance Powells will offer you a nice quote for the stack of bestsellers you just finished reading (especially if they’re still recent releases) so feel free to visit their website, enter the ISBNs of your books, and see what they’re offering.

Another buyback company I recommend for selling bestsellers to is Sell Back Your Book. This company also requests that the books you send them be in very good condition, but I’ve rarely had them reject any of the books I’ve sent them (Powells, on the other hand, has been known to deny me payment on a few books they deem below their book condition standards) so I send them several packages of books every month.

Graphic Novels

Graphic novels run a pretty wide gamut these days. Aside from the collections of superhero comic books that most people think of, you have collections of popular newspaper comic strips, English translations of Japanese manga comics, comic book adaptations of popular novels, and completely original works.

When selling graphic novels, it helps if you know something about the books you’re selling online. If you like reading comic books and/or are a fan of Japanese manga, you probably have an idea of which books are popular and which have a small fan base.

If you’re not already well-versed in graphic novels, I still recommend you take the time to quickly scan the ISBN barcodes of these books (preferably with your Bluetooth Cordless Hand Scanner) if you find a bunch of them at a thrift store for a low price.

Over time, you’ll learn to separate the high selling graphic novels from the less valuable ones – and know which graphic novel characters are popular (even if you don’t read their stories yourself!)

So how much can you earn from selling graphic novels online to buyback companies? I’ve found some superhero graphic novels can sell for as much as $15, while popular manga comics can go as high as $20!

(That said, I’ve noticed manga tends to be less popular than superhero comics overall, so everything else being equal – I tend to favor superhero graphic novels).

Once again, I recommend checking out Powells Books and Sell Back Your Book as they both enjoy buying popular fiction. (If you have some graphic novels you want to get rid of, you can even check their prices right now from your computer by visiting these websites).

I also recommend you check out Cash 4 Books as they’ve occasionally offered me the best price on a graphic novel (plus they usually pay really fast).

I hope this helps you in your search for more profitable books to sell online! Feel free to comment, and if you’d like to be informed of more blog entries in this series, please subscribe to my blog. We’ll be covering a lot more popular book subjects over the next few weeks (as well as subjects and genres that don’t sell well to buybacks) so stay tuned!